Polska källinstitutet i Lund

The collection consists of various sorts of documentation about and from Nazi concentration camps. It also includes documentation of the arrival in Sweden of Polish (Jewish and non-Jewish) survivors from Nazi concentration camps in 1945, as well as of the Swedish rehabilitation efforts, correspondence, and documentation of the institute and its predecessor’s work.

The collection also holds handwritten testimonies (and typewritten transcripts) of survivors from Nazi concentration camps, based on interviews, following a standardised form that includes date, name, personal information and generally a five- to ten-page account of their experiences before, during and after Nazi occupation. The testimonies were collected by the Polish Research Institute in Sweden in 1945 and 1946, and 61 of the 514, around 12 percent, are from Jewish survivors. The testimonies contain detailed individual descriptions of suffering from Nazi terror in occupied Poland and are signed by both the interviewer and the informant. The interview method was developed in cooperation with the Swedish historian Sture Bolin. According to the guidelines, accounts that did not correspond with known facts had to be verified by other accounts.

The Jewish testimonies were collected by a particular section of the PIZ, led by a Holocaust survivor, Luba Melchior. These records describe Jewish everyday life in Poland during the interwar period and the German occupation. They address topics like freedom and belonging, the increasing persecution, ghettoization, and the ever-worsening living conditions in the ghettos, the fate of relatives, friends, and neighbors, isolation, and their own different ways of survival. The testimonies include stories of the informants’ relation to their local communities before and under occupation and examples of support and betrayal. In volume 1, there is a detailed index of 498 of the testimonies.

In addition to these testimonies, some collected testimonies were neither completed nor registered. These documents are stored as a separate deposit in the collection (vol. 19-20), containing around 70 documents and another seven fragments, about half of which are from Jewish survivors. These do not follow the form of the standardized questionnaire that the other testimonies do. These accounts include descriptions of family life and personal relations before the occupation, Jewish life in ghettos, famine, deportations, the witnessing of killings, death, escape, and experiences of concentration camps. They are also rich in details about places, events, and people. The testimonies include a 56-page testimony by Frieda Katz, which, among other things, contains detailed accounts from the Lodz ghetto, including descriptions of Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish ghetto police, and the deportation of the children, as well as her recollections from Auschwitz. Another testimony, the 16-page account of Franka Silberstein-Salomonowicz, not only contains further details about life in the Lodz ghetto but also about survival and liberation as well as the transport to Sweden with the ‘White buses-mission’ of the Swedish Red Cross. Another witness, Izrael Wajdling, gives a testimony that includes an account of denunciations of Jews in hiding by local Poles.

Volume no. 24 includes additional information and supporting documentation regarding the testimonies. This includes lists of copies and other information about testimonies, additional information about individual testimonies, a letter testifying about medical experiments that were carried out on prisoners in Ravensbrück that was mentioned in one of the testimonies, plans, and descriptions of concentration camps, written testimonies provided in support of collected testimonies, letters, forms, lists of addresses, statistics and other documents.

Another part of the collection consists of lists of different Nazi prisons and concentration camps as well as lists of SS staff and other personnel in the camps, lists of prisoners and their internment in different prisons and camps, lists of deceased and executed prisoners as well as of prisoners who had been subjected to medical experiments. These lists build on details extracted from interviews as well as additional sources. There is also a large amount of documents from the camps that the prisoners brought with them to Sweden. These records include (largely underground) correspondence sent between prisoners in different camps and contacts on the outside, which is an invaluable source for the prisoners’ experiences in the camps. It also includes notes, lists, and other documentation produced by the prisoners. There is also a list of prisoners from Ravensbrück who were deported further to be executed in April 1945.

The collection also includes documentation about the situation of the population (Jewish and non-Jewish) during the Nazi occupation of Poland. This material consists of reports and documents testifying to the suffering under Nazi terror and of the deportations to concentration camps. It also includes records regarding ghettoization, massacres, and other aspects of the Holocaust. One volume (no. 36) also contains documentation about the arrival of survivors in Sweden, including the transports to Sweden and the arrival at different refugee centers, sanatoria, and hospitals. There is also documentation of the different information material the survivors received from the Swedish state. One of the purposes of the collection was to be able to provide evidence of crimes committed by the Nazis during the war. Two volumes (37-38) contain documentation from the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials in 1946-1947, in which one of the working group members, Helena Dzedzicka, was a key witness. The material includes the minutes and detailed notes from the trials by Dzedzicka.

The archive also includes documentation of the working group’s organization and its reconstruction as the Polish Research Institute as well as its correspondence with Swedish state agencies and other organizations that it cooperated with and received documentation from, including the World Jewish Congress’s historical commission in Stockholm, which was led by Nella Rost, and the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York, which was also a WJC-sponsored organization. Among other things, the material that the institute received from the WJC includes documentation about concentration camp personnel, statistics of deportations of Jews to Auschwitz in 1942, a list of Jews killed in the Flossenburg concentration camp, testimonies of Jewish survivors from different Nazi camps (see vol 25: 2). Personal belongings such as books, photographs, sketches, and artwork are also preserved in the archive.